Perfectly Imperfect

"Loneliness does not come from having no people around one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible." (Carl Jung)

Active ownership and minimalism share values but are rooted in different theories. In minimalism, the focus is on removal, where having less leads to gaining more. Active ownership is about having the things that matter most to you and leaving behind everything that doesn’t.

On an ordinary weekday afternoon, I visited this wonderful site somewhere in Southern Berlin. It used to be a water park before being forced to shut down due to hygienic problems. The warm September light led me to shoot this significant photograph.

Could the Big Bang theory be wrong? A proposed new model of the universe argues yes—the universe has no origin point at all.

In science, the theories with the most staying power are the ones that explain what we don’t know with the most simplicity and elegance. And surprisingly enough, the simplest new theory in quantum physics may be the one that’s most difficult for us to wrap our heads around: The universe has been around since, well, forever.

Up until now, the theory that’s made the most logical sense to explain how the universe began is the Big Bang, which holds that the universe came into being about 13.8 billion years ago as a result of a single event that launched the universe into a continuous state of expansion. But now researchers have proposed a new model with a much simpler idea of the beginning of the universe: There wasn’t one.

"On a warm summer evening in August 1952 pianist David Tudor approached a piano on stage at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York. Stopwatch in hand, Tudor sat before the piano and, without striking a note, premiered John Cage’s composition 4’33”.

Commonly known as Cage’s ‘silent’ piece, 4’33” comprises three movements during which a performer—or performers—are instructed to produce no intentional sounds for four minutes and 33 seconds. This radical gesture upended the conventional structure of music, shifting attention from the performer to the audience, and allowing for endless possibilities of ambient sounds to fill the space.

When discussing the work over his lifetime, Cage emphasized that, rather than intending to simply shock his audience, he hoped to attune listeners to silence as a structure within musical notation.”

View works from the MoMA exhibit There Will Never Be Silence: Scoring John Cage’s 4’33” here.

In December 1998, a common octopus was captured in Matoya Bay, Japan, which had a whopping 96 tentacles. The unusual octopus had the normal 8 appendages attached to the body, but each one of those branched out to form the extra tentacles. The specimen survived for five months after its capture, and even laid eggs, which hatched into normal 8 tentacled octopi. Upon its death, the 96-tentacled octopus was preserved and now remains on permanent display at the Shima Marineland Aquarium in Japan.

The great bear rainforest in British Columbia is one of the largest coastal temperate rain forests in the world, with twenty five thousand square miles of mist shrouded fjords and densely forested islands that are home to white furred black bears.

Neither albino nor polar bear, these rare black bears (there are fewer than five hundred) are known as kermode bears, or what the gitga’at first nation call mooksgm’ol, the spirit bear — a word they did not speak to european fur traders lest the bears be discovered and hunted. to this day, it remains taboo to hunt a spirit bear, or to mention them to outsiders.

The white fur in these bears is triggered by a recessive mutation of the same gene associated with red hair and fair skin in humans. though it remains unclear as to how the trait arose (or disappeared), it is especially pronounced on certain islands.

Rosetta’s Plasma Consortium (RPC) has uncovered a mysterious ‘song’ that Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is singing into space. The comet seems to be emitting a ‘song’ in the form of oscillations in the magnetic field in the comet’s environment. It is being sung at 40-50 millihertz, far below human hearing, which typically picks up sound between 20 Hz and 20 kHz. To make the music audible to the human ear, the frequencies have been increased in this recording. This sonification of the RPC-Mag data was compiled by German composer Manuel Senfft (www.tagirijus.de). Thumbnail image credit: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM – CC BY-SA IGO 3.0